If Dan Madigan decides the screenwriting thing isn’t for him, I hope he doesn’t give up horror novels. Because SEE NO EVIL, his novelization of his own script of the current fright flick starring WWE wrestler Kane, suggests a major talent.
The villain of the piece is Jacob Goodnight – though mostly referred to as “the monster” – a simple-minded, mute torturer of humans who sin. Y’know, mostly teenagers. Four years after surviving having a bullet put in his brain by a cop (and then killing that cop’s partner), Jacob resides in the hidden hallways of an abandoned, nine-story hotel. There, the man society would never understand can retreat and be left alone. Except for the weekend when eight juvenile delinquents are brought in to clean it up as part of a community-service program. Jacob doesn’t see eye to eye with visitors … mostly because he enjoys popping said eyes out in collecting them in jars.
Usually in horror fiction, the bad guy’s pool of victims includes one each of all types – the smart kid, the jock, etc. But in SEE NO EVIL, they all pretty much fill the “troubled kid” slot, and Jacob is eager to use his knowledge of the hotel’s secret passageways to his advantage, spying on them from behind two-way mirrors, popping out of elevators and dumbwaiters like a trapdoor spider, capturing them via hooked chains.
Madigan’s story contains many scenes that are suspenseful and unsettling, described quite visually to the point where I cringed. It’s a little long for something sporting a WWE logo on the spine (do we really need to know the backstory of some of these kids’ parents?), but his prose is solid and written with more polish and promise than is usually seen in the genre, and I read a few new horror novels each and every month. A grim sense of humor never hurts, either, and Madigan delivers there as well: “That frantic three-word expletive was universally the second-to-last thing that went through the brains of people who encountered the monster. The last thing entering it was usually an axe blade.” Wicked. –Rod Lott
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